LITMIR.BIZ

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were far off in Washington, but kept alert to the public interest by the supervision of a strengthened Executive.

      It sounded almost reasonable, for a while.

      The supreme actor, Buzz Windrip, was passionate yet never grotesquely wild. He did not gesture too extravagantly; only, like Gene Debs of old, he reached out a bony forefinger which seemed to jab into each of them and hook out each heart. It was his mad eyes, big staring tragic eyes, that startled them, and his voice, now thundering, now humbly pleading, that soothed them.

      He was so obviously an honest and merciful leader; a man of sorrows and acquaint with woe.

      Doremus marveled, "I'll be hanged! Why, he's a darn good sort when you come to meet him! And warm-hearted. He makes me feel as if I'd been having a good evening with Buck and Steve Perefixe. What if Buzz is right? What if—in spite of all the demagogic pap that, I suppose, he has got to feed out to the boobs—he's right in claiming that it's only he, and not Trowbridge or Roosevelt, that can break the hold of the absentee owners? And these Minute Men, his followers—oh, they were pretty nasty, what I saw out on the street, but still, most of 'em are mighty nice, clean-cut young fellows. Seeing Buzz and then listening to what he actually says does kind of surprise you—kind of make you think!"

      But what Mr. Windrip actually had said, Doremus could not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.

      He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on Tuesday evening, he did not remain at the Informer office until the returns were all in. But if he did not stay for the evidences of the election, they came to him.

      Past his house, after midnight, through muddy snow tramped a triumphant and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and bellowing to the air of "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just that week by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch:

      "The snakes disloyal to our Buzz We're riding on a rail, They'll wish to God they never was, When we get them in jail!

       Chorus: "Buzz and buzz and keep it up To victory he's floated. You were a most ungrateful pup, Unless for Buzz you voted.

       "Every M.M. gets a whip To use upon some traitor, And every Antibuzz we skip Today, we'll tend to later."

      "Antibuzz," a word credited to Mrs. Gimmitch but more probably invented by Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by lady patriots as a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the State as might call for the firing squad. Yet, like Mrs. Gimmitch's splendid synthesis "Unkies," for soldiers of the A.E.F., it never really caught on.

      Among the winter-coated paraders Doremus and Sissy thought they could make out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that philoprogenitive squatter from Mount Terror, Charley Betts, the furniture dealer, and Tony Mogliani, the fruit-seller, most ardent expounder of Italian Fascism in central Vermont.

      And, though he could not be sure of it in the dimness behind the torches, Doremus rather thought that the lone large motorcar following the procession was that of his neighbor, Francis Tasbrough.

      Next morning, at the Informer office, Doremus did not learn of so very much damage wrought by the triumphant Nordics—they had merely upset a couple of privies, torn down and burned the tailor-shop sign of Louis Rotenstern, and somewhat badly beaten Clifford Little, the jeweler, a slight, curly-headed young man whom Shad Ledue despised because he organized theatricals and played the organ in Mr. Falck's church.

      That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red chalk upon butcher's paper:

       You will get yrs Dorey sweethart unles you get rite down on yr belly and crawl in front of the MM and the League and the Chief and I

       A friend

      It was the first time that Doremus had heard of "the Chief," a sound American variant of "the Leader" or "the Head of the Government," as a popular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to be made official.

      Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But he often woke to remember it, not very laughingly.

      13

       Table of Contents

      And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an up-to-date bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in me.

       Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

      Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

      "All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years I've worked—and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!—and don't they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower—or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory—and read everything I've been too busy to read."

      Thus Doremus, in late November.

      And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus, and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.

      Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of before he was thirty. . . . No American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American.

      In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"—all that idiotic A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a table—could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.

      Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

      The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the country.

      Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes, and Windrip—no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of patronage—won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally disappeared, and smoking after his galloping heels there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.

      All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his dependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned since 1620.

      Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal, and

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